I'm contracting at a large corporation on the westside and we're looking
to develop a cross-platform app with GUI. Prior to my arrival at large
corporation on the westside the proposal was to do it in Flash. I'm not
sure how Flash is as a programming language (we need more than just a GUI)
but I suspect it's lacking in that department. Fortunately, there has
been a lot of opposition to using Flash from the Linux side of the house.
Since they seemed to be at an impasse, I suggested that they consider
doing it in Ruby/FLTK. Why Ruby/FLTK you ask? Well, for one thing, Ruby
is probably my most productive programming language at this point (and
I would be the main developer) and for another some very large
(and critical) applications have been written in the same corporation
(but in a different group) using Ruby and FLTK so I know that there are
Ruby programmers at large-corporation-on-the-westside and that we could
show off some of the apps they had written to show that it's a
for-real option.
So this morning we had our demo from the other group and people were
pretty impressed.
Now we're off to present to the next level of management. The question
that is being raised (understandably) by some of them is that they've
never heard of Ruby (these are management folks, remember) and where would
they find Ruby programmers (turns out that there are Ruby classes offered
at the corporation). Since I came from Perl to Ruby my reply is that Perl
programmers can pick up Ruby and be productive in about a week. In my
experience I felt I was _more_ productive in Ruby after about 2-3 weeks
than I had been in Perl (and I had been programming in Perl for 6 years).
So, that's why I post here to the Portland Perl Monger's. How about it -
if you had a copy of "Programming Ruby" (online here:
http://whytheluckystiff.net/ruby/pickaxe/ ) how long do you think it would
take you to come up to speed with Ruby and be productive?
Phil